Thursday, May 26, 2011

Weekend What's What 5/26-5/29

CALM AFTER THE STORM

Whether you were affected by the terrible storms of last weekend or are simply enjoying the post-Art-A-Whirl calm (like us), odds are you could do without cloudy skies for quite some time. However, the forecast mentions "sprinkles" and "overcast" so we can't help but be a bit mopey. When it comes down to it though, we're the "glass half full" types, so the bright side of the weekend comes with a plethora of festive springtime events and accompanying positivity. Enjoy!

xo-l'etoile

THURSDAY MAY 26TH (THROUGH SATURDAY)

Heliotrope 8

@ Loring Theater

1635 Hennepin Ave

Minneapolis

6 p.m. - 12 a.m. everyday / $12 per day, $24 for a 3-day pass

It's a possibility that you haven't heard any of the bands on the 8th edition of Heliotrope's exhibition of underground music festival, and that's okay – consider your trip tonight a smorgasbord of audio delights previously foreign to your ear drums. Presented by Flaneur Productions, the event once rocked the halls of the Ritz Theater. This year, Heliotrope makes the jump to the Loring Theater with a 3-day long fest featuring over 25 bands from the slightly more known – Skoal Kodiak, Chickadee Mountain Martyrs, Daughters of the Sun, Paul Metzger and Hastings 3000 – to the more obscure local bands – Blood Folke, Myrrh and Nomia. Plus, catch awesome live video montage and clips from local visual artists between sets. We'll meet you in the underground!

There can be no better place to enjoy a little ambient music than Barbette, where you can look classy and munch on some skinny pomme frites whilst expanding your musical repertoire. Doesn’t that sound like a lovely evening? Raechel Bosch and Nyteowl will be providing just the right atmosphere this evening. Bosch is a soulful lo-fi songstress, and her simple harmonies, combined with her stunning voice, will be distracting enough that you might want to consider ditching your date and saving the bottle of wine all for your little self. On the other hand, it would make for the perfect, cozy little late-night stop. Be sure to swing by and catch some sounds.

Impromptu chroma; digital distortion; LED lights bursting out of every corner. No, you're not inside the TRON movie; it's another installation of Recess come to take you to the playground. Self-proclaimed as the “unholy love child” of screenprinting/party hosting demons, Anthem Heart & the boundary-pushing visual interaction masters, Playatta, Recess combines life-size, live stop-motion projections & animation effects with haute tunes heard at your fave local dance parties to procure an epic, 3-hour long auditory + ocular spectacular. Hosted by Truth Be Told of The Tribe and Big Cats, with killer sound alchemy from the Playatta & Anthem Heart DJs, Gigamesh and Mike 2600. We have seen the future and it is indeed polychromatic.

This week’s art pick is kind of like the World Cup finals, only it’s six months long, it probably won’t cause street riots, and its competitors are armed with iPads instead of shin pads. Sub-headed an “International Graphic Battle,” Vector Lounge pits graphic designers from four world cities – Paris, Copenhagen, London, and Berlin – against each other to create an artwork in 30 minutes. Broadcast live in front of on-and offline audiences (you can watch the footage here), the battles happen one per month through November. And if May’s colorful, politically-charged, and downright snarky creations (courtesy of Copenhagen and Paris) are any indication, these next five months are going to be insane. Catch the next one, Paris v. Berlin, on June 16. We guarantee you’ll be so hooked, you might even consider painting your chest for future occasions. Not that we’d encourage it.

Far from lawn gnomes, pinwheels, and tacky garage door decor, the creations you’ll see at Constellation: A Backyard Art Expedition won’t make you cringe or wonder if your neighbors are creepers. That said, South Minneapolitans should consider themselves warned of any and all arty feats occurring in the hood this weekend, including (but not limited to) aeralists in trees, beer brewing demos, visual art, a mobile zine library, food, live music, and the karaoke Art Shanty. Centered on garages and backyards, the show addresses art as an integral – and, perhaps, inevitable – part of our daily lives and domestic communities. The master schedule can be found here, but we recommend the take-a-walk-and-see-what-happens approach (13th, 14th, and 15th Avenues South in the 20-30 blocks seem to be a hot spot), making sure you stop at 2731 14th Avenue South on Saturday between noon and five for a muti-channel sound installation called “Deep Phillips l -Ambient Tarp.” Happy art hunting!

April showers have come and gone, which means it’s high time for Bitch Flowers’ (the drag persona of l'etoile bestie/stylist/interior designer Richard Anderson) annual spring awakening: a riotous dance party/drag show, aptly named “April Showers Bring Bitch Flowers.” Housed at the Varsity Theater, this year’s event introduces a new blossom – the restyled spring lines from local designers Emma Berg, Raul Osorio, and Ivan Idland, as well as a DIY-styled lingerie collection by Lollycopter. The night will also feature special performances from Krystal Kleer, Camille Collins, and Bitch Flowers herself, with special guest dolls Polly and the Hot Buttered Crackers and Esme Rodriguez, Harley Wood and the Wrecked Wheelhouse providing the soundtrack. After the show, dance all night long to DJ Shiek. A night of sass, camp, and bitchin’ fashion – we’re in!

Something debaucherous this way comes. It’s… an art show? In a four-part harmony of sorts, mixed media miscreants Garrett Perry, Jesse Draxler, James Justin Sehorn, and Chris Park are bringing us VICES INC, a collection of 14 paintings worked on simultaneously by each of the artists throughout the past year. And if the sneak peek is any indication, we’re in for a wild ride – even more so considering the gaggle of live musicians, dancing, and mash-up DJs that will also be there, including World Class Art Thieves (erm, hope their name isn’t serious), Sluggydee, and Scooterboi. Vice, schmice. Like red wine, French fries, and bad TV, this event is just too good to abstain from.

Take everything you love about classic rock heroes Led Zepplin – the fuzzy guitar wizardry, powerful bass lines and echoed vocals – throw in a blues rock reminiscent of The Black Keys and a vintage cosmic twist that would make Barbarella and Flash Gordon proud, and you have the celestial sounds of Little Man. For tonight's release of their 6 track EP, Orbital Amusement, members Brian Herb, Chris Perricelli and Sean Gilchrist prepare to rock Turf Club-goers into the musical galaxies; ray guns sadly not included. With sonic distortionists the Red Pens, grit-rockers The Rockford Mules, and special guests the Cosmonettes.

You know Isabella Rossellini's Sundance Channel short-film series about the seduction rituals of bugs where she dons an actual insect costumes? Well, Cirque du Soleil OVO is kind of like that, except more contortion-y and definitely more PG. Amid this colorful cast of “death-defying butterflies and high-bounding crickets,” lies a heartwarming tale of the enigmatic, chaotic and vibrant cycles of insect life. Be amazed by vivacious acts, labryinthine sets and the razzle-dazzle of futuristic superhero-esque bug suits, not to mention a beautiful 'samba meets electronic' soundtrack composed by the Brazilian-born Berna Ceppas.

Once a co-press with Semiotexte – a translation company founded to introduce Foucault and other 60's French philosophers to the U.S. – the small, non-profit, Autonomedia, is known as the “umbrella book” publishing house. Since '83, the org has been an all-volunteer editorial collective out of Brooklyn boasting more than 100 titles in distribution and proudly keeping intellectual anarchism and analytical activism alive. From arts 'n' media, cyberfeminism, drug lit and queer novellas to counterculture novels, economic and political theories, highbrow+lowbrow science fiction stories, graphic novels and poetry, the Autonomedia collection has it all. And believe us, you don't have to be a femi-nazi or radical lover of molotov cocktails to appreciate this site; just a literature fan with an open mind...And perhaps being a cultural studies geek wouldn't hurt. They also put out a really sweet annual calendar dubbed the “Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints,” where every day turns into a radical holiday or honors the life of an influential mogul of the progressive variety. FYI, it's not too late in the year to gift us one!

In case you don’t remember last year’s annual Memory Lanes Block Party (which is entirely plausible, given the insane amount of fun and dranks that goes down at this gig), let us remind you: food menu. Beer tent. Celebrity dunking booth. And—oh yes—a heavy-hitting local lineup, packed with artists you should really be paying to see. We would become apoplectic with joy were we required to list all the artists playing this weekend, but here’s some highlights: Saturday features the Goondas, Pink Mink, and the inexhaustibly awesome Mark Mallman; Sunday has both an outdoor stage with the Sex Rays, the 4ONTHEFLOOR, Lucy Michelle & the Velvet Lapelles, and Split Lip Rayfield while the Bootstrap Family Band and Cadillac Kolstad & the Flats occupy the Pabst Beer Tent Stage; Monday sees the Fuck Knights, Misery, the Goddamn Doo Wop Band, and Useless Wooden Toys. Plus, there’s DJed After Parties inside on Saturday and Sunday from DJ Shannon Blowtorch, Tomahawk Tassels & Her Tribe Of Tease, E.L.No., and Davina & the Vagabonds.

Get a petit peek of the walls of New York as XYandZ welcomes NY-based street artist, Erik Burke (aka Over Under), for a residence exhibit and installation. Burke's latest work is a concentration/reflection on his hometown city where sprayed paint figurines lay locked inside the infrastructure of architecture. In one portrait, an anonymous leg bursts from a crack of a door; in another, urban landscapes stack on top of one another, exposing the restrictive natures of man-made scenery. Burke then pastes these images on the walls of his very edifice inspirations, and thus – as the title suggests – buildings beget buildings. Visually stunning, provocative, and not to be missed.

On the off chance you’ve visited the Dead Sea, you probably have a photograph of you floating in it, maybe even holding a book or magazine for added airs, er, cool points (If not, Google it for some laughs and, admittedly, a moment of awe). Playing on such notions of buoyancy, oceans, libraries, and “highly subjective histories,” including personal family stories, book and visual artist Isa Gagarin has created a series of drawings and collages titled “Sea of Tranquility.” Opening Saturday at Honeycomb Salon, the show also incorporates elements from cinema, astronomy, and ethnographic imagery for a hodgepodge of the familiar and unfamiliar, of science and play. For added sweetness (or perhaps to balance out the saltiness of the Dead Sea), Cake Eater Bakery will providing treats, with DJ James Leonardo and Wasted Past covering the tunes.

One of our favorite monthly dance jams is here! The badass boys of Attitude City are at it again with their installation of music and mayhem. Join the Jeff Dubois and special guest King Otto for a night of delicious dance beats and Clubhouse Jager’s tasty cocktails. Not only is it free, but we guarantee that you’ll have an awesome time mingling and dancing up on some of Minneapolis’ finest.

With the onset of summer, nostalgia is just about as heavy in the air as humidity. And if you ask us, such a feeling should always have a soundtrack, a go-to album for both a sunny day car trip or a thunderstormy night on the hardwood floors, staring at the ceiling and delving into the great mysteries of humanity. Okay, maybe that’s a bit melodramatic, but Stornoway’s melancholy-yet-clever lyricism, not to mention its entire conservatory of instruments (horns, banjo, Celtic fiddles, upright bass, celesta), gets us all misty-eyed and existential in the best way possible, as only a British indie folk band formed beneath a banner of adoration for Teenage Fanclub could provoke. Besides, what’s not to love about a song called “Zorbing,” which compares that first love exhilaration to an obscure sport that originated in New Zealand (to “zorb” is to roll around in wide open spaces in a huge, transparent plastic ball)? Reminisce, away.

We don't typically write about Sunday happenings, but the annual Rhymesayers-procured Soundset extravaganza is simply too epic to ignore. The self-proclaimed "official midwest kickoff festival of the summer" is once again taking over Canterbury Park boasting a whopping 8 hours of live entertainment on two stages including some of the biggest names in independent rap. This years line up: (drumroll please) Big Boi! De La Sol! Brother Ali! Doomtree! P.O.S.! and of course Atmosphere. There is plenty to do at Soundset in addition to rapping-out - live painting throughout the day, skateboarding, and a sweet car show round out the day's activities. Hold on, its gonna be a wild one.

BONUS! Didn't get enough party packed into your day? Bring your sunburn on down to First Avenue for the Official Soundset Afterparty hosted by Brother Ali, featuring an all out blowout of Get Cryphy, Wants VS Needs, and Special Guests.

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